I just checked whether HTML5 enabled YouTube works on my wife's Windows 7 laptop. It seems that it does on Opera 10.60. I disabled the Flash plug-in and restarted the browser. After enabling HTML5 trials I was able to watch YouTube while on few other pages which are full of Flash I was notified that I am missing Flash plug-in.

Speaking of OpenBSD you have to be careful. Opera 10.60 is not ported since it requires more Linux emulation. Poul Irtofi is currently working on adding support for 2.6 Linux kernel emulation. Couple months ago before he got involved it looked that Linux emulation code will be completely removed from the kernel.

I hate Mozilla and even more Chrome so I am holding my OpenBSD 4.8 update partially because I know that Opera 10.11 (the OpenBSD port) will not work on OpenBSD 5.0.
YouTube has never been really an issue on OpenBSD and there are numerous workarounds for YouTube videos. The real issue is the lack of Flash (I have no idea how good is Gnash) after the collapse of swfdec project. For instant Flash is used in some interactive editors on Learning Management Systems commonly used in U.S. (means I use it at work). It doesn't look like HTML5 will kill Flash so the effort of Poul Irtofi is welcomed in particular if he can get evil Adobe Reader and MATLAB to work on OpenBSD.

Essentially my approach at this point for those couple applications (mostly MATLAB) if I have to use them is to NX X to a cluster which runs PUIAS Linux.

I tried it with Firefox 5.0 from OpenBSD 5.0. The system was an intel atom 330 all in one mobo. I'm utilizing the onboard 945gc video which has handled flashplayer but as mentioned was choppy.

Oko, what video chip does your wife laptop have and how was playback and audio quality?

The youtube/html5 website said any video that had a leading advertisement would not work - almost seems like a benefit.

I have a similiar system that I run OpenBSD current on and one the lower tier mirror update will try firefox 8.01. Also thinking about Opera on FreeBSD 9.0 once the final version is released.

I'm also looking into WebKit based browsers which would be based on h264 codecs rather than WebM.

Edit2: I added Midori to OpenBSD 5.0 which supports both h.264 and WebM and playback was much better. Midori with html5 enabled, and possibly other webkit based browsers, are a viable option for viewing some youtube videos. Midori in OpenBSD-current is unstable and crashes readily

Last edited by shep; 13th December 2011 at 04:10 AM.
Reason: grammer added Midori for both 5.0 and current

@shep
My wife's laptop is DeLL Latitude D630 and I think it has Intel video card. I am not sure and I do not have it right here to check. The playback and audio quality is indistinguishable from the latest Adobe Flash plug-in. As of Midori vs xxxterm conversation the problem is not in browser itself (even though that Midori is becoming a kitchen sink like Firefox) but in rendering engine.

@Daffy
You guys are hitting WebKit bugs. I had a great hopes when WebKit became open sourced but now I can not wait for Poul Irtofi to finish Linux emulation 2.6 so that I can continue to use Opera 10.60 on OpenBSD. For pure browsing I really, really like NetSurf!

Adobe has stopped all Flash development on mobile. It has stated their full efforts are now on HTML5 and its video and audio elements. YouTube is moving away from Flash, too. Every flash dev I know is ramping up for movement to HTML5 video/audio.

All current browsers support HTML5 video/audio with hardware acceleration. It's only a matter of time.

@Daffy
You guys are hitting WebKit bugs. I had a great hopes when WebKit became open sourced but now I can not wait for Poul Irtofi to finish Linux emulation 2.6 so that I can continue to use Opera 10.60 on OpenBSD. For pure browsing I really, really like NetSurf!

Hello Oko,

Is there a reason why you would prefer to use Opera 10.60 after Linux emulation 2.6 is finally supported on OpenBSD? Have you thought about moving to FreeBSD since Opera now supports FreeBSD version? I'm just curious about your reasons behind your preference of the chosen browser.

On the topic, I have viewed youtube's html5 videos on Firefox 8 a few days ago and it seems decent so far.

HTML5 doesn't work with all video's, It doesn't work with any video which has ads for example.

It also doesn't work very well IMHO. stuff like fullscreen etc. suck. In my experience, the flash player works better, at least on Windows.

IMHO using youtube_dl is still the best solution. And since UNIX doesn't mandatory lock *everything*, you can just start playing with mplayer/vlc/... after a few seconds without downloading the whole file first (Doesn't work on Windows).

__________________
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.

HTML5 works with all videos that are in the proper format despite its content. I really haven't played with this for quite a while. I know there were problems with playback at one time. I'm just not on top of it anymore.

EDIT: On this Windows laptop right now, I switched it to YouTube's HTML5 video and full screen works pretty good on Chrome and Safari. FF8, too.

Is there a reason why you would prefer to use Opera 10.60 after Linux emulation 2.6 is finally supported on OpenBSD?

I do not use new features of Opera 10.60 but Opera 10.11 is almost two years old. As of why do I prefer Opera over any other browser the reasons are obviously mixture of technical and emotional.

Quote:

Originally Posted by bmk1st

Have you thought about moving to FreeBSD since Opera now supports FreeBSD version? I'm just curious about your reasons behind your preference of the chosen browser.

I was using FreeBSD until about four years ago when I switched to OpenBSD. Without trying to start any flame wars here or offend numerous FreeBSD users who frequent this site, FreeBSD is far inferior flavor of BSD than OpenBSD and I could give you logical and technical reasons for that. Actually IMHO FreeBSD is the least exciting of BSDs projects right now and the least real Unix of all BSDs. NetBSD or DragonFly BSD would be far better alternatives to OpenBSD than FreeBSD and both are developing rapidly and very originally (unlike FreeBSD).

Adobe has stopped all Flash development on mobile. It has stated their full efforts are now on HTML5 and its video and audio elements. YouTube is moving away from Flash, too. Every flash dev I know is ramping up for movement to HTML5 video/audio.

All current browsers support HTML5 video/audio with hardware acceleration. It's only a matter of time.

Wow, a year ago the situation was quite "depressing". Most YouTube videos only worked with Flash (or not at all for boycotters ) and most browsers sucked at HTML5.

A lot has changed since then!

Most videos work perfectly on Opera 11.60. I only had a sound problem. Until today: I updated the GStreamer framework/plugins and all multimedia libraries (libogg, libtheora, etc.) and now I have sound too. Playback is good enough, even though the CPU usage is very high due to disable hardware acceleration on my system.

IMHO using youtube_dl is still the best solution. And since UNIX doesn't mandatory lock *everything*, you can just start playing with mplayer/vlc/... after a few seconds without downloading the whole file first (Doesn't work on Windows).

Youtube-dl is great, but recently I’ve found myself using cclive instead: